Category: Best Of

So Vogue magazine got all literary and did an Edith Wharton spread to commemorate the grande dame’s 150th birthday. But there’s a problem. We see Edith and her friends kicking it at The Mount, Edith’s country home. Living male writers depict deceased male writers:

“There is Jeffrey Eugenides in a bowler hat doing his best Henry James. There is a bow-tied Junot Diaz as Wharton’s (unrequited) love interest, diplomat Walter Berry. There is Jonathan Safran Foer, hair severely parted down the middle, posing as Wharton’s collaborator, the architect Ogden Codman, Jr.”

It goes something like this: men and women are at war with each other because men are from Mars and women are from Venus.

Women have emotions and men do not.

Women want relationships and men do not.

Men have sexual desire and women not so much.

Therefore, men must manipulate as many women as possible into having sex with them (because that’s what all men want) and women must manipulate men into commitment and marriage (because that’s what all women want). click for more

And just to add — I searched stock images for ‘powerful woman’ and ‘powerful womanhood’ and was depressed and dismayed at what came up. Apparently being a powerful woman means wearing a manly business suit, pretending to box, pretending to box while nearly naked, holding a gun, or standing alone. Lame. Incredibly lame. If you can find something better, please send it to me. click here

Early in our relationship, when my boyfriend and I still considered ourselves frovers – a cross between friends and lovers, not boyfriend-girlfriend but more than friends with benefits (I was not a ‘Rules’ girl) – he asked me, “So what do you want to do with your life?”

I talked for a bit, and he was thoughtful.

“Is something wrong?” I said.

“I’m just impressed,” he said, “that you were able to answer the question. Most women can’t.”

I thought of this when I read this post, which asks the very reasonable question: How can you go after what you want when you have no idea what you want? You can’t know what you want if you’re not sure who you are, and since we’re all works-in-progress, I would say that even those of us who know what we want, might not always remember what we want, or find ourselves clinging to outdated notions of what we want, or wake up one morning to realize that we’ve wanted all the wrong things. So I think the question, much like the line of breath in meditation, is something you have to keep returning to: keep remembering to ask, and to listen for the answers. click here

I posed topless for a female photographer who specializes in boudoir. I’m lying on the bed in a man’s velvet smoking jacket, hair blown across my face. I look at the camera. It’s a beautiful portrait (the photographer is very talented) and I’m proud of it. It reminds me slightly of Manet’s Olympia. That painting caused a scandal at the time — not because the subject was nude — but because of how she stares at the viewer instead of looking away demurely.

It’s that act of shameless eye contact that makes her – according to the moral dictates of the era — truly “bad”.

I once said to someone, “I don’t know if I’m a good girl with a bad streak, or a bad girl with a good streak.” But I was being ironic. My real point was that, like any other woman (or man), I am both and neither.

In fact, it’s kind of amazing to me that the good girl/bad girl dichotomy still exists. It came up again when movie star Reese Witherspoon…click for more

I’ve been thinking about secrets. The characters in my novel-in-progress, THE DECADENTS, all have them. They have to do with desire, especially forbidden desire, and the destructive forms it can take when repressed. And as these secrets surface, one by one by one, the world of the story changes forever. I’m fascinated with the idea…